Report from YAPC::Europe

By Mark Summerfield on October 2, 2000 12:00 AM

This is written for those poor souls who couldn't make it to give them aflavor of the wonderful event they missed.

Despite being an ex-Londoner, I got on the wrong tube Friday
morning. The train was packed and boiling hot; there weren't any bomb
scares which was a nice change, but elevators weren't working in some
stations, which were therefore closed. I arrived rather late in the
first part of Johan Vromans talk. I'd opted for this instead of Stas
Bekman's talk because I'd been to all Stas' excellent talks at
Apachecon in March and have read his mod_perl Guide many times. The
talk was interesting and solid, moving rapidly through the material.
The threat of being dropped into a bucket of water silenced the last
mobile phone.

During the lunch break I had a chance to go out into the hot sunshine;
the predicted weather for the weekend was ``warm and wet,'' but it was
sweltering, sunny and dry, quite uncharacteristic. I also met some
people I knew through e-mail; it's amazing how different people are in
person. After lunch, the first dilemma arose: Writing Solid Perl or
The Template Toolkit. I ended up going to the Toolkit talk by Andy
Wardley and Simon Matthews. The talk was excellent; there are many
similar tools available in Perl -- we've all written our own (I know I
have), but I was so impressed with the Toolkit that I expect to use it
in my projects in future.

Most people gathered into clusters and went off into the evening to
pubs, clubs and the like to enjoy London's lowlights. I'm not one for
socializing with more than a handful of people at once, so at the end
of the day I left, exhausted by all the input I had received, and met my
wife. She spent most of the entire three days up the road at the
National Gallery with 2,000 of the world's finest paintings, free
entrance and a nice cafe; she was in heaven. Back at our
accommodation, I finally got to look through the goodie bag. The T-shirt
is something to take rock-climbing or mountaineering -- it's orange
color is so bright it could save your life. BSDI thoughtfully
enclosed not just a CD, but a nice pair of red plastic horns. I tried them on, but they
didn't seem to do anything. When my wife tried them, well, it was like my
birthday all over again. O'Reilly thoughtfully enclosed Johan's Perl 5
reference book which was most appreciated.

By Saturday, I was beginning to get an idea about who was who. Greg
McCarroll is a big man, both physically and in personality; he's full
of energy and fun, and spent endless hours rescheduling in the light of
last minute changes. His name tag read ``grep,'' indicating he was either too
tired to spell his own name or he's read one too many Unix
books. Dave Cross, London.pm's chieftain, was also involved as an
organizer and a sponsor. He's the type of man who gives consultants
a bad reputation. His obvious sincerity, honesty and competence will
unduly raise client expectations, ruining customers for those
consultants who follow him. A few Americans also made it; some guy
called brian d foy tried to attack grep; apparently grep had spoken
Brian's name in uppercase. There was also an insect who grep called
Nathanial. The entire conference was haunted by an Australian spirit
called Damian that keeps telling Larry Wall to be objective when
reading the RFCs.

The next talk was Art and Open Source by Simon Cozens. It was sheer
synchronicity; he put up a slide of a Seurat painting while up the
road my wife was looking at a real Seurat in the National. The talk
was interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking.
Simon likened modern artists who are no longer bound by
patronage to produce flattering and `nice' art to suit their patrons to open
source software developers who are not constrained by their employers but can
build the software they want in the way they want.

Kevin Lenzo
talked about YAS (Yet Another Society) and hoped for future YAPC's
in North America, Europe (Amsterdam?) and beyond. It was clear that
despite being thousands of miles away, Kevin had been of considerable
help to Leon Brocard and London.pm in getting things off the
ground. Next up was Honza Pazdziora from the Czech Republic. He's
written software that allows a user on a Linux box to convert Word or
Excel documents into more tractable formats by executing Word or Excel
on a single Windows box and getting the results back on their own
machine. For those of us who see Windows as a legacy OS, this looks
useful. BRIAN D FOY (who's too far away to hit me :) ) gave a
summary of what the Perl 6 process is and a taste of some of the
issues it will address. There is unlikely to be any progress on the
Do::WhatIWant module, but many other issues will be addressed.

One or two people had a minor interest in Perl 6, so there was an impromptu
lunchtime discussion with Nathan Torkington on problems people have with Perl
5 and what they want from Perl 6. My own contribution to the discussion was
so exemplary that gnat said that he had memorized every one of my ideas and that he
would personally implement all of them without me even having to go through
the bother of writing an RFC; needless to say everyone else's ideas were
either barmy or impractical, or both. With less than a week to go until the RFC
deadline, it isn't too late to get the full richness of COBOL syntax into Perl.

Lunch was on O'Reilly, but I opted for sunshine in case we didn't get
any more for another year. After lunch it was lightning talk
time. They were fast furious and fun. Some serious, some not, but each one
was worth listening to. Because Kevin made us keep to time (no one argues
with a whip) we managed to get some extra ones in, the last one being
gnat's Python talk in which he gave a wonderful overview of Python's
virtues in a calm and balanced manner, pointing out one or two minor
drawbacks in passing. In a conversation afterward, it was clear that
gnat really likes the RFCs which amount to ``make Perl 6 into Python.''

Charlie Stross gave a somewhat calmer talk on his
NetServer::Generic module. This talk reminded me of the adage:
``Don't do it until you look in CPAN!'' I've written quite a few
programs recently that could have been made far more robust and
considerably simplified had I used this module. Dave Cross followed
with his talk on data munging, plus a shameless plug for his new book
on the subject. Piers ``Heckler'' Cawley rounded off the day by
confessing to some of his Perl sins.
Pier's sin was to reinvent the wheel, and to do so thoroughly and with an
exemplary expenditure of time and effort over several weeks. He had to produce
a sophisticated sort function that would work on a variety of data, some
strings, some numbers and some combinations. He ended up finding the perfect
algorithm to convert his data into a form that would compare properly in all
cases from Knuth's third volume. He later realised that the entire function
could be replaced by a simple call to pack().

Piers asked others to come up
to the stage and confess along with him. What was sad about this was,
no matter how awful the sin, no one was surprised because we are so jaded by seeing bad programming
practices.

For the evening, Dave invited everyone to walk around Southwark with an
occasional refreshment stop; by all accounts this was a popular
trip. I arrived at 10 a.m. Sunday to find a new schedule (first event, 9 a.m.
-- bah!). I went to Marc Mosthav's talk on IrDA with Perl and Windows
even though most people ran to the other talk rather than face the
Win32 API. It's amazing what you can get working on toy OSs. Chris
Young from the BBC described how his little bit of the BBC makes
extensive use of Perl, surrounding perfectly good live TV with text
boxes filled with facts and journalistic jottings -- it was almost
enough to make me rush out and buy a digital TV. Leon popped up again
with a talk on Graphing Perl -- I wasn't looking forward to it, bar
and pie charts don't give me much of a thrill but it turned out the
talk was about proper graphs, the nodes and edges sort; Leon presented
visualizations not just of Perl data structures, but of Perl programs,
including graphical representations of a profile of a
program which uses color and position to identify hot spots. It was an
excellent presentation given with dry, reticent humor.

Because of the popularity of Saturday's Perl 6 discussion, another
discussion took place before lunch. Gnat is a charming and engaging
man, but one can't help wondering when his brain would explode from all
the conflicting demands. Things will doubtless be better once Larry
has decreed the language that we shall speak and the energy can go
into implementation.

Foolishly, I went for a walk at lunchtime and got soaked; warm rain is
unusual and it took hours for me to dry off. Kevin Lenzo's talk
on Speech and Perl followed lunch; it was heartening to see that
the open-source world is keeping up with both speech recognition and
speech synthesis, and to see the amazing processing work that Kevin is
doing in Perl. My final talk was Benjamin Holzman's on
XML::Generator where he showed that what should be a simple task
has many subtleties and isn't straightforward. The winding up time was
conducted by grep, who will never get a job at Sotheby's; auctions
aren't supposed to lead to rugby scrums, bloodshed and fighting, but
this auction came close. Buffy finally made an appearance, in the form of
videos provided by sponsor BlackStar. It was a fitting end to three
great days; I certainly had a wonderful time and I'm sure that must be
true for just about everyone. Congratulations to all concerned.